“Wireless electricity” reports Business 2.0, and covered by Engadget.
“Powercast’s platform uses nothing more complex than a radio–and is cheap enough for just about any company to incorporate into a product. A transmitter plugs into the wall, and a dime-size receiver (the real innovation, costing about $5 to make) can be embedded into any low-voltage device. The receiver turns radio waves into DC electricity, recharging the device’s battery at a distance of up to 3 feet.”
This can only be an April Fools, if nothing because of the semantics of the article. Apparently this system has ‘already been approved by the FCC’ – which I doubt because everything that gets approved by the FCC is published publicly (and the various gadget blogs scour through for juicy tidbits).
It’s the bane of mobile cell phone manufacturers and companies like Apple because they have to ‘come out’ when they go to get FCC approval.
Well, as they say, if you try to April Fool before/after 1st April then the Fool is on you…
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer
There was an article about this “breakthrough” published in a newspaper a couple of years ago here in Australia.
Coincidently it was also published on 1st April 😉
If it’s a joke, they’ve been preparing for it for several months by planting fake news releases from CES, like that of winning the CNET award, Philips prototypes shown..etc.
Oh, wait, they also had to fool CES visitors, who actually saw the prototypes 🙂